Grain Producers South Australia (GPSA) is establishing a Sustainability Roadmap to identify opportunities for greater sustainable practices in the grain industry to meet market, consumer and stakeholder demand. GPSA is undertaking this project for the South Australian grains industry to guide the efforts in areas of research, policy and grower engagement in the sustainability sector.

This phase includes development of a sustainability roadmap, intended to showcase how the SA grain industry can become more sustainable.

Project description: 

GPSA has been working with Adelaide based Edge Impact (Edge) to develop a Sustainability Roadmap that provides a pathway for GPSA to help support a sustainable, productive and resilient South Australian grain industry.

Building on the findings from previous phases, our approach for this grant was staged in three phases:

1. A two-to-three-hour strategic alignment workshop with up to 25 participants to test initial roadmap actions and assumptions developed through previous engagement between consultant, Edge, and GPSA.
2. Draft roadmap development and testing with up to five experts, and presentation to GPSA board for stress testing.
3. Incorporate feedback from GPSA Sustainability Working Group, Board and industry stakeholders/experts to develop the final roadmap.

The Roadmap sets out a prioritised list of activities for the delivery on for the grain industry. The roadmap has been designed to support the South Australian grain producers and associated stakeholders to embrace sustainability and move forwards as an industry towards its future state.

Key achievements and results: 

Roadmap Development

The Roadmap is informed by the following key findings from Phases 1 and 2:

• There is a need to gather data and monitor progress against key sustainability topics including emissions, biodiversity, soil health, chemical stewardship, water use efficiency and social factors. Gathering baseline data is also needed to support verification of the widely accepted notion that South Australian growing practices are more sustainable than the global average.
• There is a missing link between the grain industry’s current practices and how it communicates its story; current growing practices are perceived as having lower emissions and greater soil health than the global average. However, the industry has fallen short in both verifying these credentials and communicating externally to position the South Australian grain industry as one of the more sustainable options in the market currently.
• Grower knowledge on sustainability is varied, with some growers self-educating, and others having a minimal understanding. There is a need to address this knowledge gap to ensure congruency across the state, empower growers, and ensure growers are informed about the risks of not acting on sustainability.
• Industry collaboration is essential to provide consistent advice and tools to farmers, create alignment on what the most important sustainability metrics are to monitor progress against, and how to effectively monitor these.

These learnings have resulted in the roadmap containing five distinct pathways:

• Pathway 1: Establish the baseline – to define and implement a unified approach to sustainability and data collection
• Pathway 2: Monitor progress – to become an industry that understands, manages, and mitigates its sustainability impacts
• Pathway 3: Showcase SA’s sustainability story – to be recognised as a global leader in sustainable grain
• Pathway 4: Bridging the knowledge gap (enabling pathway) – to ensure SA growers are actively engaged in sustainability and understand their responsibilities
• Pathway 5: Facilitate industry collaboration (enabling pathway) – to ensure SA grain industry is aligned on sustainability goals, methods, and expectations for farmers

Pathways 4 and 5 are ‘enabling pathways’ – a unified, sustainable industry is not possible without upskilling growers and their network, and ongoing support and congruency across the industry. It is important to note that these pathways are in no way mutually exclusive and should not be viewed in isolation of each other. Each pathway is dependent on the other pathways’ progress and have only been developed linearly for ease of implementation.

Each pathway contains short-, medium-, and long-term milestones. Within the milestones, key objectives, outcomes, and activities are defined, based on the detailed insights from Phases 1 and 2 and feedback from stakeholders. Timelines and responsibilities were attributed to each milestone during the stakeholder workshop. The one-page overview of the roadmap allows users to clearly visualise each pathway on the timeline.

Further information:

The GPSA draft roadmap for consultation from the grain producer community can be found here: South Australian Grain Sustainability Roadmap